Alright so I left my job two weeks ago. 22nd of August was my last day at Kurtosis. Its been a little over two weeks and I have decided to start writing on this blog again. I want to write about my learnings and any experiences I have had in the last couple of weeks.

So why did I leave my job?

I have always wanted to start my own business and that itch isn’t going away. I got into programming after watching “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” when I was 13 and I like the idea of building things with computers and selling pure software. I want to give it a shot, I have been playing with llms since Januaryh 2023 and I think there is something special going on and it is a great time to build a business. I am 28, turning 29 soon, don’t have any dependents and I feel well placed financially & mentally to take on risk.

Further, back in April 2024 I received a Global Talent Visa that allows me to be unemployed, self employed or work for anyone in the UK. This is amazing as I have a bunch of friends and family in the UK, and now the UK feels like home. This really gives me the permission to explore to figure out what I want to build and do with life.

So what is the plan?

I found this video a few weeks ago by HealthyGamerGG that talks about being lost in your twenties and that really echoed with me. If you watch the video, I’d place myself in the exploration phase. I know I want to build something, I have some ideas, I have some spaces that I echo with but I have to explore spaces. I also have to do the hardwork to find a cofounder who shares an interest in the same space that I’d like to build in.

The idea is to explore spaces to eventually find a “zip code” that I can commit to, and then start with my best hypothesis in that space. This shall come through action, introspection and reading. I have started building random side projects in order to learn some skills that will be useful in this journey of company building. I will talk more about the details later in the post.

I am still figuring out whether I should focus on finding a co-founder or whether I should focus on committing to a “zip code” / “idea space”. The advice on this is biographical like all advice. I’m finding balance between the two different opinions. I have some natural inclinations towards certain spaces, adn I can have conversations with folks who are interested in those spaces. As finding, meeting & talking to people is a low throughput process, I keep building / exploring my inclinations.

How long do I keep exploring?

This is a tricky question. There needs to be some balance between comitting & exploring. As its just been two weeks of exploration, the balance lies in the side of exploring. I want to give myself until March of 2024 to either -

  1. Find a cofounder + deep interest in a space who I have raised or am in the process of raising a pre-seed with
  2. Find deep interest in a space and raise a pre-seed solo
  3. Get traction + revenue on my own projects that pay the bills

That would be the order of preference. I have been struggling with the question of boostrapping or venture in the past year. I think venture is a really great way to build a business that compounds over time and delivers maximum impact. I also understand that the journey of founding a startup & running it is a long, lonely, hard, painful one so having a co-founder is really helpful for mental health, bouncing ideas and productivity.

I would greatly value 1 over 2, 2 over 3. If its March 2024, and I am not at 1, 2 or 3 then I have to make a judgement call of whether I keep going. My answer there would be if I can make peace that this journey isn’t for me at this time, then I can work for someone full time, this time fully committing without the “itch”. Otherwise I keep going, maybe I start part-timing, free-lancing, as I continue the exploration.

What has been going on for the past two weeks more concretely?

I had started writing this out as a diary entry but I have decided to be more concise. I will use bullet points -

  1. I have been building out some of my ideas, learning how to finally design frontends (thanks Cursor), shipping them and getting people to pay for them. I started working on MyGuy an AI assistant that woould make calls on your behalf and was able to get a few people (friends so far))to pay for them. Yesterday I was at a Hackathon and I built a silly app that morphed you into movie posters and I was able to get some more people to pay for them.

  2. I have been meeting friends, friends of friends, former colleagues, friends of former colleagues, people at Hackathons, people through co-founder matching, people at meetups and other events. This has been fun! I have met some really ambitious and smart people over the last couple of weeks. The Bay Area really allows you to be ambitious. At an event I met one of the foudners of Etched, they’ve raised $120M at a $600M valuation to compete against Nvidia for LLM inference. The two co-founders are 21 & 22. This is really inspiring.

  3. I have been learning more about LLMs, their internals, watching videos of Karpathy and trying tools beyond the simple GPT/Claude API. I have been attending events & workshops that talk about how LLMs are currently being used in enterprises, how people are building with them and what challenges people are facing.

  4. I have been learning what works and what doesn’t work for businesses using LLMs. I have learned about new types of businesses that are now possible due to LLMs. I have met some founders with ridiculous amount of growth in usage and revenue which has been eye opening and inspiring.

  5. I have been trying to meet customers where they are. I was workshopping ideas with a friend in the elderly care space, so to see if I am actually interested in that space I started visiting care homes & assisted living facilities. I am reaching out to founders in different spaces to see what they are building and what challenges they have faced.

Some more concrete learnings

  1. San Francisco is definitely a special place to start a startup - you see people doing well you get inspired, you see fellow founders going through the journey and you feel a sense of empathy and learn from them

  2. There are spaces that I am definitely not interested in that I can eliminate - Fashion Tech, Ed Tech, E-Commerce, Market Paces, Climate Tech, Agritech

  3. There are some spaces that I am more interested in than others - Finance, Taxes, Insurance, Infrastructure, Healthcare

  4. I want to the end user of my product or the customer of my end user

  5. I should charge more

  6. Play your own game

  7. The ocean